A politics of Opacity: Thinking Against Surveillance

Dileep Menon is a professor of History and International Relations at the University of Witwatersrand, and the Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa

When does the question of surveillance segue into individual participation in the process through negligent ignorance, frivolous actions, and the desire for visibility and self-promotion? We are now conditioned to connect our sense of individuality with the idea of privacy. We believe that personal information, ranging from innocuous things like name and address to more specific details like monetary status and love interests, defines us as much as our genetic makeup does. However, we are largely unaware of the many ways in which we leak information about ourselves when we engage online, paying for groceries as much as porn sites. We willingly engage in games on Facebook that require uploading our photograph to see which film actor we resemble or to have a retro makeover that generates a pleasing avatar. On social media, we put up what we see, what we hear, what we eat (mainly), and who we hang out with. If the state or any corporation wanted to know where we were or what we bought, in fact, the very patterns of our movement and consumerism, we have surrendered all this information willingly. Hollywood films revel in detailing the extent to which antiestablishment characters have to go to be genuinely off the grid; a small slip is enough to have the myrmidons at one’s heels. Despite our conscious surrender of data regarding ourselves and our lifestyles, we still continue to believe that a combination of evil capitalism and an intrusive state is somehow extracting information about us without our knowledge.

Of course, much of this vacuuming of information is done in the clear light of day under the guise of state pastoralism. From the Aadhaar card to voter registration to the PAN card, the public is gently bludgeoned into surrendering information about identity, income, and location. The idea is that one should be permanently in the floodlights of the state. There is as much opacity as transparency generated by these processes on account of typos, recalcitrant thumbs that do not yield identity matches, and mismatches between people, their names, and their images. While this can occasion much ridicule from the social elite, matters of legibility or illegibility become matters of life and death for the marginal and dispossessed.

To become beneficiaries of the redistributive state, the surrender of information by the subaltern is the price that they have to pay.

However, the sheer inefficiency, or in most cases, the chicanery of the state machine means that in the process of generating legibility people become invisibilised. They cease to exist as voters, as citizens, as the beneficiaries of yojanas, and indeed as humans. Surveillance brings to light as much as it occludes. It creates a whole regime of exclusions, even as the net is thrown wide, generating gerrymandered geographies. Persons become what they are not – illegals and ghuspetiyas – or they become mere categories without individuality. Some are more individual than others under the surveillance state. A willing surrender of information across myriad platforms in response to the promise of largesse, generates dumb data – of no value and incapable of representing anyone.

At the other end of the spectrum are individuals who mark their uniqueness through multiplying images of themselves linked by the idea of consumption and taste. On X, Insta, Threads, Facebook Reels, a million mirages are generated every day by those who invent themselves from dawn to dusk. We get intimate moments with family and cats, modeling of a purchase, presence at desirable locations - from events to high-end stores, foreign travel, and poses with friends and lovers. All of these constitute a gratuitous encyclopedia for insurance companies, travel sites, and income tax regulators. If any information were actually solicited about income, expenditure, and tastes, people would complain about the invasion of privacy and Big Brother constantly watching them. But no one has to ask now. In the pursuit of an ineffable individuality – ironically, a being like everyone else - vast amounts of information are voluntarily surrendered. Surveillance becomes unnecessary; systems of data gathering are sufficient. We tend to think that the accumulation of Big Data comes about through an evil farming of intimate information from an innocent population. However, the words that we need to think with are less associated with a noble naivete, and more with unchecked hubris, the motor of vanity and consumption that lies at the core of the presentation of self in the world. Solipsism has become the driver of the economy of information, a disconnected connection, an oxymoronic existence. The images that are generated in the billions, giving away far too much about people, are in lieu of an actual connection with actual people. It is the presentation of a face to the world for Likes and Love and the adulation of strangers.

When popular movements broke out in 2011 across North Africa and the Middle East, they were named as the Arab Spring by a Eurocentric press that saw benighted spaces wishing to drink at the well of Western democracy. What marked these movements in Egypt and elsewhere was the use of social media, WhatApp and other forms of communication to connect, mobilise, and agitate. Amidst the euphoria of celebrating a new form of political engagement, there were also cautionary analyses that argued that social media retained its vicarious nature even in the midst of revolution. Watching a revolution was more appealing than actually putting one’s body on the line. Alongside, the use of social media gave away too much about those who wished to organize clandestinely; the triangulation of location was easy for the state. Increasingly, political insurgents search for opacity – masks, anti-face recognition helmets – whether in Hong Kong or Iran. The new politics has to be one of opacity and illegibility to the state and capital, not the naïve and self-indulgent transparency afforded by social media. A visual underground as it were where there is less a relentless projection of images and more a tissue of real connectivity. Holding hands rather than a cellphone.